


Death's Blessing

by aflyingcontradiction



Category: Original Work
Genre: Family, Gen, Gore, Religion, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-14
Updated: 2017-10-14
Packaged: 2019-01-17 04:52:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12357867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aflyingcontradiction/pseuds/aflyingcontradiction
Summary: The sisters entered the temple to see the creature everyone was talking about. But face to face with a spirit of vengeance, they might find something entirely different from what they expected.





	Death's Blessing

“Ava! Come on! Get your ass up and just jump!”

Lashi was attempting to whisper but the temple’s walls threw her voice back to my ears in a dozen echoes, turning it into a cacophonous hiss. I scooted along the ledge and glanced over the side. I could see them in the distance, a huddle of blue robes and glinting glaives. Gods, those looked sharp.

“This is a really, really bad idea,” I said as quietly as I could, unsure whether she’d hear me all the way on the next ledge over. “We should turn back.”

“Oh, don’t be a wimp. Don’t you want to see it?”

“No, no, I really don’t.”

“Well, I didn’t climb all the way up here just to turn back just before the show starts. Besides, everyone would laugh at us.”

“I’d rather be laughed at than break my neck,” I muttered.

“Nobody asked you to come anyway.”

“I’m not letting you out of my sight. You’d go and do something stupid. Like this!” I said, angrily waving my arm at the abyss of stone deities whose eyes would follow my body all the way down to where it would smash on the temple’s mosaic floor if I made just one wrong move. “Come back. We’ll lie, we’ll tell them we saw it.”

“We won’t know what it looks like.”

“It looks like any old horrifying abomination that likes tearing people apart limb by limb. I don’t want to be here when they try to banish it.”

“Well, I do!” Lashi said and with a last eyeroll my way she turned around, hunkered down and slid off the ledge.

“Lashi! Shit!” I was on my feet and across the gap between the ledges before I even knew what was happening. 

My heart was beating in my throat, making it hard to breathe, as I carefully lay down to peek over the side of the ledge. For a horrible moment, I thought I was seeing my little sister’s shattered form far, far below. 

Then my eyes caught up with my imagination and I realised that the red stain on the temple floor was part of the mosaic and Lashi was, in fact, squatting on the head of Kasim the cat-faced, destroyer of plagues, just below the ledge, grinning up at me.

“What’re you crying for?” she asked. 

I quickly wiped an errant tear out of my eye and growled at her: “You could’ve gotten yourself killed, you stupid, stupid girl.”

Lashi shrugged: “Are you coming or not? ‘Cause if you’re not, I’ll go on on my own.”

“Oh, Gods above, be sensible. If you go any closer, they’ll hear us! We’re not allowed to be here, it’s sacrilege, they’ll kill …”

“They won’t kill us.”

But Lashi had not seen them, back when they had declared the earth we lived on, the very fields that fed us, sacred ground and our settlement sacrilege. She had been fast asleep in Mother’s sling as we had fled from their swords and their whips and their fires. She didn’t know that the priests were the reason why we now lived as we did, on the city’s roofs, off stolen crumbs like the pigeons, afraid to walk the streets for too long, lest they decide we were an abomination and needed to be extinguished. She didn’t know what they were capable of. I wasn’t about to enlighten her, either. She was too young, she didn’t need to know all that. All she needed to do was to trust and obey her older sister for once. Was that too much to ask?

“They’ll have us whipped, at the very least. Come back! Now!”

Lashi snorted loudly: “You’re such a stick in the … oh, look, they’re starting.”

Below us, the blue-hooded figures had started to form a circle around the altar of Fira, Lady of the Dead. Maybe they had already started chanting, but their voices did not carry all the way up to where Lashi and I were sitting.

“I can’t even see what’s going on,” Lashi whined.

“You don’t need to see what’s going on. We need to leave! I swear to the Gods above, below and beside, if you climb any further down, I will…”

But it was too late. With a death-defying leap, Lashi had bounced off Kasim and was now hanging off the wing of a bird god I didn’t recognise. I only barely stifled a shriek that would surely have given us away, even at this height. 

But Lashi had never been in any danger of falling, it seemed. With the ease of a girl who had been clambering up and down the city’s walls from the moment she had left her mother’s sling, she quickly found a foothold and before I had even caught my breath, she was lying comfortably on the bird’s wing, beckoning me over.

“Please,” I mouthed, but with a hurried glance downward I realised it was too late. 

The priests had started circling the altar, crossing and uncrossing their glaives in an intricate pattern. A smoky figure was rising from the centre of the altar, indistinct at first, but growing larger and larger. I looked at Lashi, alone on the wing of the bird some distance below me and I jumped.

\-----------------------------------------------

Somehow I didn’t plummet into the depths but ended up on the bird’s other wing, trying my best to balance my body on the narrow surface. From here I could hear the priests. 

The head priest - I recognised him by the golden diadem on top of the blue hood - was shouting an incantation that was clearly meant to contain or banish or destroy the spirit that had infested the altar of Fira. But the form, which was now twice a man’s size and still growing, seemed anything but contained. 

We had all heard the stories of the spirit sneaking up behind random worshippers, then grabbing them and tearing them apart, limb by limb, leaving their body parts scattered throughout the temple. The priests seemed to have forced it out of the altar, but could they handle it? I didn’t want to take the risk. I needed to get Lashi and myself out of here and fast! 

I looked up to the window through which we had climbed in. It was so far up now. Not impossible to reach, but there was no time and that thing was still growing taller and growing more solid now, too. Oh Gods.

“Lashi!” I whispered. “We need to…”

A shriek! Oh no. Oh no, oh no, oh no.

It had taken only a second for the indistinct shape to form into a very, very solid horror, gleaming white with huge red eyes, a maw filled with several rows of teeth, four long, muscular arms and razor-sharp claws as long as Lashi’s legs on each of its fingers. 

It screeched like an oversized hawk, making my eardrums ring and my head hurt. 

Lashi, too, had stuffed her fingers in her ears and was watching wide-eyed and unmoving. 

As the priests started chanting once more, she realised I was looking at her, smiled and mouthed: “It’s amazing!” Her eyes were gleaming. Lashi, unlike me, seemed to be convinced that we were about to witness the banishing of the abomination.

Lashi was wrong. As we watched, she too excited to move, I too terrified, the creature slowly bent down toward the head priest, cocked its head like a confused dog and then, in a movement so swift it was a blur, its arm shot out and grabbed the priest by the neck. 

I hid my eyes but I could not hide from the horrible sound of tearing flesh and cracking bones that followed nor from my sister’s loud: “OH SHIT!” as the head priest’s head came sailing through the air and bounced off the wall just below where we were perched. It left a bloody stain right between the crowns of the Twin Gods.

The priests weren’t chanting now, they were screaming and scattering, some still waving their glaives, some running for their lives for the temple’s doors as the monster ripped another one of them apart, still shrieking.

“Ava! What do we do? What do we do?”

I looked at the ledge above us. I wouldn’t be able to reach it and the wall here had no footholds and were we going to get anywhere before that thing decided the priests were boring and realised we were here, too? We weren’t going to get out of here alive! I should have put my foot down and stopped her, I should have kept an eye on her to make sure she didn’t sneak in here, I should have grabbed her and dragged her away from the temple, using force if I had to. 

But I hadn’t. I hadn’t and now she would die and it was my fault. But maybe - I looked at the ledge again - yes, maybe I could get Lashi out, even if I couldn’t run myself.

“Lashi! Here! I’ll give you a boost!”

I had hoped she would miss the obvious problem, but it took her no more than a glance to realise: “But, Ava, I can’t pull you up. I’m not strong enough!”

“I don’t give a shit!” I screamed. “Get over here! NOW!”

I had given up any attempts at secrecy now. I had to scream at the top of my voice to even hear my own voice over the din the monster and the priests were making. Still, Lashi seemed to have heard me or read my lips and slowly came crawling toward me, shaking her head the whole time.

“Stop being stupid!” I said and grabbed her by the arm as soon as she was within reach.

“OUCH! You’re hurting me!”

“You’ll get hurt a lot worse if you don’t get out of here now.” 

There were only a few priests left alive now and they’d had their escape route cut off by the monster. They were cowering behind statues, pleading in increasingly desperate cries for the protection of the gods the statues depicted. The monster, unimpressed, knocked a statue’s head off its shoulders with the armless body of one of the priests’ compatriots. 

Lashi was crying now. It had been years since I had seen her cry - she was usually too embarrassed in front of the other roof dwellers. But now I didn’t know if she could even see straight through her tears, as she slowly climbed onto my shoulders, whispering: “Please don’t, please don’t” all the while.

“Just shut up and…” 

A blood-curdling screech stopped me in my tracks. I slowly turned my head toward what I already knew was there, but didn’t want to see. And yet, there it was, its face and body blood-spattered, its head cocked, hanging by one of its clawed hands off a ledge just feet from where I was trying to heave Lashi up. It was staring right at me and slowly, very slowly a vicious grin appeared on its face, showing off too many teeth to count.

“Lashi. Run.” I whispered, gathered all my strength and threw her up to the ledge above.

And the monster pounced.

It was on me so fast that I didn’t have time to check whether Lashi had made it, but I hoped that the time it took the creature to kill me was enough for her to get out of the temple and far, far away. I stood no chance against this supernatural horror, but I wasn’t going to go down without a fight. Maybe I could buy Lashi a few precious seconds. 

The moment I felt the monster’s icy arm grasp at me, I started kicking, biting, scratching and hitting at every bit of it I could reach. I expected to feel myself torn apart any second now, to feel its sharp talons ripping into my skin and slicing me open.

But … I didn’t.

Instead, the creature closed its giant hand around me. It was uncomfortably soft, cold and smelled of decay and I couldn’t move a muscle, but I wasn’t hurt. It lifted me up to its horrible face. Was it going to bite my head off? I tried to see if I could spot Lashi. At least then I’d know whether she was safe before I died. But I couldn’t turn my head quite enough. All I could do was stare doom in the face.

Then doom screeched. A painfully shrill noise that made me flinch and wish I could at least stick my fingers in my ears. And it screeched again, and again. A long sound, then some short ones. Over and over again. Rhythmically. Its eyes were wide, staring right at me, its pale brow was furrowed. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought it was concerned. 

My heart very nearly stopped when I heard a screech that was clearly a word. It was loud and high-pitched and barely comprehensible, but - implausibly - this monster had just said: “YOU!”

“M-me?” I stammered. 

The creature’s eyes went even wider, its grip loosened slightly and it quickly moved its head up and down. Yes! It was nodding! Gods above, below and beside, it was the weirdest sight I had ever seen, something this inhuman just - nodding. 

It kept on screeching and the longer it went on, the more words I could make out.

“YOU … UNDERSTAND!”

“Yes. Yes, I understand what you’re saying. I think.”

“NO! YOU … UNDERSTAND!”

“Now I’m not sure I do.”

“HELP!”

“You’re asking for help? Help with what?”

“YOU … HELP …” it started again and then I felt myself slowly being lowered onto a ledge. 

The being loosened its grip and my feet touched the stone again for the first time since I had accepted death. It seemed my legs had concluded they’d never have to do any work again and had just given up on their job - I had to lean against the wall to stop myself from collapsing. 

But the creature barely let me regain my footing before laying its giant hand on my shoulder and nearly knocking me down again. Hard to believe as it was after watching it brutally murder a dozen priests or more, the creature was clearly trying to be gentle. 

The moment I stopped wobbling, it used one of its long claws to point to what I thought was the ceiling of the temple.

“YOU … HELP …”

I turned my head. Several stories above us, right at the spot it was pointing to, I could see a tiny figure, perched on a statue’s head. Lashi. She hadn’t fled, but she was alive!

“YOU … HELP …” screeched the creature again and pointed more insistently to my sister.

“Yeah, I help her. She’s my sister. Of course I help her,” I said, hoping that I had understood what it was trying to tell me.

“SISTER…” it said in a long drawn-out screech that sounded oddly thoughtful for a sound made by a horrifying monstrosity. 

“Yeah, she’s my little sister,” I said. “I help her because I love her.”

“SISTER … YOU … HELP … SISTER. MY … SISTER!”

“No, no, she’s my sister,” I said pointing at my chest.

“NO!” the being shrieked loudly, bearing its teeth and nearly making me jump off the ledge in fright. “NO! YOU … HELP … SISTER!”

My heart was beating so fast now that I thought it might burst. I wanted to tell Lashi to leave but she wouldn’t hear me, she was way too far up, and I didn’t want to draw the creature’s attention to her just in case it decided to continue its murderous rampage now because of whatever mistake I had just made.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t understand.”

“HELP … MY … SISTER! HELP MY SISTER! YOU! HELP! MY SISTER!” It kept screeching over and over again. 

“Okay. Okay.” I said. “Please. I want to help. Just, please, please calm down.” I considered adding ‘And don’t eat me’ for good measure but I didn’t want to risk insulting the creature. 

“So you have a sister.” 

It felt like an absurd thing to say - how could a being like this, an abomination from the underworld, infesting Fira’s alter, how could such a being have a sister or any family at all? 

But I was out of options. If that’s not what it meant, then only the Gods could help me understand it and only the Gods could help protect me from being ripped apart at the seams by a creature livid at the fact that nobody here seemed to understand.

But as soon as I mentioned the creature’s sister, its eyes widened and it started frantically moving its giant head up and down. Maybe I had understood after all.

“And your sister needs help?”

It continued to nod. A breeze of hot air, created by the movement of the creature’s head, hit my face.

So there was another one of these things in some other temple? Surely not! I would have heard about that. The news of the temple massacres had spread everywhere, even to the roofs, within less than a day. Unless the creature’s sister was in some other city. I’d never left home, though, and there was no way I was going past the city walls! You couldn’t approach them via the roofs, I’d have to walk the streets, I’d get picked up by some guard or some priest that didn’t like my face and put in the stocks or whipped or killed and then what would happen to Lashi.

On the other hand, if the creature got angry at me for not wanting to help and tore my head off, Lashi would have to manage on her own as well. I didn’t have much of a choice here.

“So where is your sister?” I asked.

The creature screeched loudly and started flapping its arms so excitedly that I had to brace myself or I’d have been blown off the ledge. Unfortunately, in its excitement, the noises it made started tumbling all over each other, turning, once more, into an incomprehensible cacophony of shrieking.

“I’m … I’m sorry … I don’t understand. Please…”

I wasn’t sure what I was going to say? Please calm down? Please try again? Please don’t tear me apart because I can’t help you? Please don’t go after Lashi next?

The creature looked at me and fell silent. Then - I might have burst out laughing at the odd sight if I hadn’t been so terrified - it sighed. A deep, disgruntled sigh. A wave of hot, fetid air washed across my face, making me cough. Its arms dropped to its sides, its terrifying head hung low, the beast looked downright dejected. 

“Listen, I want to help, but you are really hard to understand,” I said. “Maybe if you try to explain again more slowly…”

But the beast had turned away from me. It looked around for a moment, then, in a flurry of motion, it grabbed me and I felt my feet leave the ledge.

I’m not sure if I even screamed. I barely had time to fear for my life before my feet were, once again, on solid ground. I was standing next to Fira’s altar now. The beast held up a clawed index finger, as if it was telling me to wait. It grabbed the head priest’s headless body from the floor and with the same index finger, it sliced open the priest’s gut in one swift movement. 

I couldn’t help but flinch and look away. I wasn’t very fond of the priesthood but seeing a man gutted right in front of me wasn’t my idea of a fun time. As the metallic smell of the blood reached my nose, a wave of nausea hit me. Fortunately I hadn’t actually eaten anything that day. Still, it took me a few moments of retching to regain control. 

I was so distracted that I jumped and gave a little squeal when the creature tapped me on the shoulder. 

It had cocked its head and was pointing to the flat stone surface of Fira’s altar where a large picture was now drawn in blood. I forced back another retch. I wanted to run, but I knew I wouldn’t make it two steps before the creature grabbed me. And Lashi probably still hadn’t left. What if it went after her?

So I tried to decipher the gruesome painting.

“Is that … is that a house? And that’s … a dog?”

I jumped about two feet when a tiny voice beside me said: “It’s clearly the mud temple, you dope.” 

“Lashi! You’re not supposed to be here! You’re supposed to be home and safe! Why did you … and how?”

I looked up at the temple’s ceiling, so far away. She must have scrambled all the way down here in no time at all using statues, ledges and the uneven stone walls as footholds. She could have broken her neck!

“It wasn’t that hard. Getting down is way easier than getting up. And you clearly need my help. A dog? Seriously? Look, that’s the statue of Kerab the horse-legged, it’s really obvious from above.”

“Huh?”

I looked at the drawing again and tried to imagine what it would look like from a bird’s eye view. 

“I guess I can kind of see it. … Is that where your sister is?” I asked the creature. It nodded.

Great! Just great! That whole place had been burned down by the priests only a few days ago. I’d never been there myself, but I knew because there had been an influx of people to the roofs. People with burned skin, whip scars on their backs and a haunted look in their eyes.

The other night, after Lashi had gone to sleep, one old man had told me how the priests had destroyed the mud temple, because its congregation had no need for priests; they worshipped in a different way. The priests had come with torches and battering rams and they had torn down the temple and set the slums around it on fire in the middle of the night, while everyone was asleep. Then they had started attacking those who fled.   
I thought we’d had it bad, but at least my family had survived their attack back then. That poor guy had lost his wife and all five of his kids. People said the place was still smouldering even now.

“That’s the place where the priest massacred everyone, isn’t it? Where they burned babies in their beds and hacked their mothers to pieces…”

I gasped. “Lashi! Who told you about that? You’re not supposed to know about all that!”

Lashi frowned at me. “I hear things. How stupid do you think I am?”

“You’re still here! And you just climbed all the way down here and risked breaking all your bones just to join a game of charades with me and …” I wanted to say ‘a murderous beast’ but I didn’t want to insult the murderous beast, so I just waved in its general direction. “... I’m not sure you want me to answer that question.”

Lashi harrumphed. 

“So, your sister is in there?” I asked the creature again, even though I knew the answer. Well, the smouldering site of a massacre was certainly a fitting place for a creature like that. “If you know where she is, why don’t you go and help her? Nobody’s going to stop someone like you.”

The creature screeched, but I couldn’t make out any words this time. It must have noticed I hadn’t understood, because its next move was to run full tilt at the temple doors. The moment it reached the door frame, an invisible force bounced it back all the way to where we were standing. It looked at me, then looked at the door, then gave an almighty screech.

“I see,” I said.

“We’ve got to help it … her … sorry.” 

I frowned at Lashi. 

“What? We do! It’s the right thing to do, isn’t it? Besides, it’ll be really exciting.”

Unlike me she seemed to have gotten over her terror already. She had always been too adventurous for her own good.

\-----------------------------------------------

Several hours later we were hopping across the rooftops in the direction of the mud temple ruins. Or rather, Lashi was hopping, while I was trailing behind, completely out of breath, trying to stop her.

“Lashi… wait up…”

Finally - I had probably run after her for half an hour or more - she stopped at the edge of a roof and gave me an impatient glare: “You’re so slow. We’ll never get there.”

“We shouldn’t do this,” I panted. 

“Huh?”

“It’s dangerous. There’s no reason why we can’t just go home.”

Lashi frowned at me and said: “But that creature said it needed our help.”

“Yeah, and it’s stuck in that temple. It’s not like it can follow us and take revenge if we don’t help it. Let’s just go home!”

“That’s awful! You’re awful!” Lashi shouted. “It asked for our help, we can’t just leave it.”

“You’ve always been too kind for your own good. Remember the guy who asked for directions.”

Some months ago while Lashi and I had been scavenging for food down on the ground, a man had approached us and asked for directions. I’d wanted to run, but Lashi insisted on helping him. It turned out that the man was working for the city guard and we only barely escaped arrest.

“That was different.”

“No, it wasn’t. Besides, what if that creature’s sister is less accommodating. We’ve only just escaped being ripped to shreds by an angry monster, I don’t fancy risking that again on pur … LASHI!”

My sister had simply stopped listening to me and continued on her way.

“GODS ABOVE, BELOW AND BESIDE!” I yelled. “YOU ARE THE BIGGEST PAIN I HAVE EVER HAD THE MISFORTUNE TO MEET!”

Then I followed her. 

A little under an hour later we could see the smoke, thin in the air but noticeable nevertheless. The rumours had been true. The slums around the mud temple were still smouldering. I looked down from the roof we were standing on. 

“Wow, look, they’ve completely destroyed Kerab’s statue. He’ll be pissed!” said Lashi.

“They won’t care,” I replied. Kerab was a god of the weak and destitute. I knew of nobody on the roofs who didn’t pray to him and of several people who had tiny Kerab figurines for luck. The priesthood, however, didn’t recognise him.

“So it said its sister is over there, right?” said Lashi, pointing to a small, ruined shack made of mud bricks right next to the destroyed Kerab statue. The being had drawn a long arrow of blood to that spot.

“You’d think the sister would be stuck in the mud temple, wouldn’t you?” I wondered aloud. 

Lashi shrugged. “That’s not where the arrow went!”

“I know that’s not … wait a second!” I caught Lashi by the sleeve just as she was about to climb down. 

“We can’t stay on the roofs, they’ll collapse under our weight!”

“I know that,” I said, a little annoyed. After all, I had been clambering up and down buildings longer than her, even if she sucked it up with her mother’s milk. “But you need to look before you climb. If there’s still priests around, or guards…”

“Oh, come on. Just look! There’s nobody here! Everyone’s dead or gone. Who’d even stay in these ruins?”

“Still, you’ve got to be careful. I don’t want you to get hurt.”

“I won’t. Stop worrying.”

“I can’t. Not as long as you do dumb stuff that’s likely to get us both killed. Let’s have a proper look before we go down.”

I lay down on the roof and let my head hang over the side to see if somebody was standing right next to the building we were on, then stared into the distance. All I could see were smouldering ruins. There wasn’t a living soul in sight. Lashi had been right. 

I was a little relieved - things would be much easier this way - but admittedly also a little annoyed that I could not tell her ‘I told you so’, especially when she waved her arms at the desolation with a smug look on her face and said: “See?”

“Yes, yes, I see. That’s why I looked. Now let’s get this over with, if we must.”

We scrambled down the side of the building and quickly approached the shack. I didn’t feel comfortable down here. It was dangerous, the guards and the priests who were so incompetent at climbing and so little of a threat on the roofs could pick us off with ease down here. And who knew what that thing’s sister was going to do to us when we met it.

Lashi, too, seemed to move with less aplomb down here. She wasn’t quite a fish out of water. More like a river snake, clearly aware that it was no threat outside of its element and that a random bird could pick it off any second now, but it would still show its teeth if you came too close.

We had reached the door of the shack. There were no holes in the walls but the curtain that had once covered the door had burned clean away. I could hear something shuffling inside. Lashi and I stood on either side of the door frame, looking at each other but both too scared to peek inside.

“You first,” Lashi mouthed at me. Oh, now she was frightened.

“We can still leave,” I whispered. “If we leave now…” 

There was another shuffle inside.

“No, we’re not leaving,” said Lashi, this time a little louder, took a deep breath and stuck her head in the door. I immediately jumped to her side and grabbed her by the arm. We both stared into the darkness for a moment. What would we find? What would find us? My heart was beating in my throat.

It took a while for our eyes to get used to the darkness. We were standing there, staring blindly at the inside of the small shack, which smelled of dirt and smoke and … blood? Nothing jumped out at us but we kept hearing the shuffling noise and neither of us was brave enough to step inside.

Just as the shapes inside the shack were becoming clearer, I suddenly heard a quiet moan.

“Did you hear that?” whispered Lashi. 

I nodded.

“I think it came from there.” She pointed at a bundle near the back wall of the shack. “I’m going in.”

“You stay behind me. I’ll go in first,” I said.

We had a little scuffle by the door, because Lashi didn’t want to hide behind my back, but eventually I managed to push her aside and enter. 

Slowly, holding my breath, I took a step toward the bundle in the back of the room. If only I had some kind of weapon, but I’d lost my only knife running from the guards some weeks ago after we had cut somebody’s purse strings. 

The bundle was definitely moving, rocking very slightly back and forth, trying to shuffle across the dirt floor. If it was a monster, it seemed to be a rather slow and indecisive one, given that we were still alive and unharmed.

It was Lashi that made the first step: “Hello?”

The thing stopped shuffling. Then it let out another low moan.

“We’re here to help you,” said Lashi, pushed me away and walked toward the bundle.

“Stop!” I hissed.

“You don’t have to be scared,” she said and I wasn’t quite sure whether she was talking to me, the bundle or herself. She slowly approached and then sat down next to the bundle. 

For a moment there was silence, then Lashi whispered: “Ava? I think it’s a kid. It sounds like a kid.” I watched in awe as she slowly started to unwrap the moaning thing.

Lashi gasped. I was by her side in a split second, ready to defend her from whatever that thing was. I’d use my teeth and nails if I had to. But when I got close enough to see the contents of the bundle in the dim light, I couldn’t help but to gasp myself and stumble backwards.

It was a kid. The bundle was toddler-sized but that kid must have been Lashi’s age. The only reason she fit was that she had no arms or legs. They must have been hacked off. The whole bundle was drenched in blood. What remained of her body was emaciated and full of angry red burns. Had she been lying here since the attack? Gods above, below and beside - how was she even still alive? It was a miracle. A horrible, horrible miracle. She had to be in unimaginable agony.

The kid tried to say something, but only a raspy cough escaped her charred throat.

“Ava! Water!” 

I nodded, grabbed the water pouch from my belt and handed it to Lashi, who held it to the girl’s mouth. She drank greedily, spilling water all over her broken body.

“We’ve got to get her out of here,” I said to Lashi. “We’ve got to find her help. A doctor.” I had no idea how we were going to afford a doctor, but she was right: We had to help this poor kid. Somehow. And herbs grown in rooftop gardens wouldn’t do for something like this. She needed someone with proper medical knowledge. But maybe she was beyond saving… how on earth had she held on this long?

Lashi, as usual much more straightforward than me, voiced what I was thinking in an urgent whisper: “Gods, how did you even survive? That’s about half your blood on that blanket. Ava’s right, we’ve got to get you out of here.”

“I can’t,” moaned the girl. Her voice was barely audible and we both bent closer, even though the stench of blood and suffering was overwhelming. “Wait for Lia. Lia said, wait.”

“Who’s Lia?” I whispered.

“Sis...ter… Lia … wait. Can’t … go … alone.”

The moment she said the word ‘sister’, Lashi and I looked at each other.

“Do you think…?”

“No way. But what if …”

“But that thing can’t be her …”

“That thing’s haunting the altar of Fira! That must be for a reason, right? Maybe it came back from Fira’s realm.”

“So you think it … she … died and couldn’t come help her sister.”

“Well, I don’t see anyone else here. No monsters or creatures. Just the girl.” 

“So we take her back to the temple? Maybe her … sister can help?”

“Do you think we can move her without killing her.”

“She’s survived this long. We’ve got to try anyway. We can’t just leave her here and there’s no doctor who’d treat her for free anyway. Her … sister’s the only chance she has, right?”

\-----------------------------------------------

I wasn’t sure whether this was the right thing to do and even Lashi seemed unsure, but it was the only idea we had that didn’t involve leaving the girl in the shack to die and pretending we had never seen a thing. 

So we ripped up the tattered blanket she had been lying on, because it was the only cloth we could find, and bandaged her up as well as we could, then we used what remained of the blanket to tie her to my back. We couldn’t tell whether she was bleeding through the makeshift bandages, because they were already so blood-drenched. So we hurried as much as we could.

It wasn’t easy climbing with the moaning girl on my back and, in fact, I slipped so often, very nearly falling to my death several times, that Lashi eventually insisted she carry the girl. I tried to talk her out of it, but Lashi was her usual stubborn self and we didn’t have time to stand and argue while this little girl was slowly dying. Missing half her body, the poor kid wasn’t too heavy and we actually progressed faster once Lashi was carrying her. 

We reached the temple just as night was falling. It was deserted now. The only priests in sight were those that had made it just past the temple door before succumbing to their injuries. 

The little girl moaned softly on Lashi’s back. She was very weak, but still holding on.

“We’re almost there,” I tried to reassure her and myself, but on the inside I was praying to Kerab, to Fira and to any other god that might listen to help us make it through and guide us on the right path, because if this was not what we were meant to be doing, if she was not in fact the sister of that creature in the temple, then that little girl would die and Lashi and I would probably follow her within minutes, if not seconds.

We reached the temple doors, which were still cracked open as we had left them.

“Hello?” I shouted. There was no answer. I wasn’t sure how to call for the being. ‘Hey, horrible abomination from my worst nightmare, we’re back’? 

“Hey …”, I started again and then added, though I had no idea whether my hunch was right, “Hey, Lia.”

There was a loud screech from inside, followed by the bang of something large hitting the door, which swung shut. 

“I’m not sure about this anymore,” I said to Lashi.

“Oh, shush, it … she was probably just trying to get out again, don’t be a wuss,” Lashi replied, clearly trying to sound nonchalant, but I could hear her voice trembling and she was paler than I’d ever seen her before. 

I tried to say something, anything to reassure her, but the words wouldn’t form and then the little girl on her back gave a surprisingly loud moan of “Li...a”. There was another screech, this time louder and longer and … hopeful? Maybe I had imagined that last thing, though.

Before I could decide if I had, however, Lashi had made the decision for me and opened the door.

The creature was waiting just steps from the temple doors. It seemed like it had been pacing - there was a neat little path where all the rubble from destroyed statues had been swept to the side by its giant feet. When it saw us, it stopped and stared for a moment. Then, as it spotted the bleeding girl on Lashi’s back, its eyes went wide and it screeched.

The girl, implausibly, managed to lift her head somehow and, even more implausibly, smiled at the monster: “Lia.” Her smile was so blissful, she could not possibly be seeing the same thing I was.

The creature was on Lashi in a split second. I screamed. She screamed. When the creature broke away from her a split second later, her face was full of blood. Gods!

“LASHI!” I started towards her.

“I’m fine. I’m fine. Everything’s fine,” my little sister answered, gasping, and wiped the blood off her face. It hadn’t been hers. It had been the little girl’s. The little girl was no longer on her back either. The creature was now cradling her in its arms. Softly. Gently. Like a little baby. The girl was still smiling. And so was the creature. The creature lifted its face and looked back at me and for a moment, just a fleeting moment, its face looked human. It - she - opened her mouth and for the first time I could understand her clearly as she said: “We can leave now.”

She walked backwards to Fira’s altar, all the while holding my gaze. As she reached it, her body melted into the stone and she and her sister slowly sank into the altar, as though it were mud. Just before they disappeared from sight, she said: “You have Fira’s blessing.” Then they were gone.

I looked at my little sister, blood-spattered, exhausted and stunned, but alive, so very alive, and I wondered: Was the blessing of the Lady of the Dead a blessing I really wanted?


End file.
